Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Button, button...who's got the reset button?

They can see Russia from their front porches, and they don't like what they see, in the Baltic states, reports the Moscow Times;

Ukraine's conflict with Moscow-backed separatists has
unnerved Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, the only parts of the former
Soviet Union that have joined NATO and the European Union.They are small, geographically isolated from the rest of the
EU, and have Russian-speaking minorities, which President Vladimir
Putin declared last year gives Moscow the right to intervene with
military force.

As Russia has done in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. So, wanting peace;

For more than a year the three countries have prepared for a
kind of murky conflict or "hybrid war," with exercises against
"saboteurs," campaigns against Russian "propaganda" and increased
spending on defense and border security.

.... "We need to learn lessons which we learned in Crimea, which
we partly see in the east of Ukraine. Any possible attack, in any form,
needs to be taken seriously," Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite
told Reuters in May. "What makes sense for us is to be prepared for
anything."

Many Baltic residents say concerns over Russia have filtered
down to daily life, to the extent the possibility of Russian occupation
comes up when many people discuss buying homes.